Almost half a million abortions a year
Baguio City (AsiaNews) – About 473,000 abortions occur every year in the Philippines according to a report based on data collected by the government and presented Wednesday at the Sixth National Homebirth Conference by Elizabeth Dumaran, secretary of the Midwives Foundation of the Philippines.
“A higher proportion of pregnancies are unintended in Metro Manila, and an even higher proportion of those pregnancies end in abortion,” Ms Dumaran said.
According to the Guttmacher Institute’s report on unintended pregnancies in the Philippines, 1.43 million pregnancies documented each year are unintended. This is half of the total number of pregnancies in the country, the report said.
Midwives are preparing themselves for the task of championing safe sex, now that some politicians have started to block a health care information drive meant to curb teenage pregnancies, Dumaran said.
The correlation between teenage pregnancies and abortions is high and has many causes.
“They (teenage mothers) are often ostracized by their own families. Their boyfriends often leave them. [. . .] We should be pro-active and seek out these young mothers, so we can assist them in child birth and child rearing since they rarely know where to turn to except midwives,” she added.
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10/11/2017 16:21
